~ Heading back to Callie

Monthly Archives: October 2011

I visited a 26 year old neighborhood hair salon today where I saw women walk out the door with undried freshly cut hair.

While waiting my turn I mentioned to the wet headed red head how wonderful I thought her hair was, and she said very plainly to me, “there’s a joy in knowing who you are.” No need for blow dry, product, or fancy clothes to define her. To be sure, this salon has given her a ton of choices for cuts and products to make her hair wonderfully quaffed. But today, I got to see the women who are delighted with their cuts even if others may not see the stylized blow out look they will later wear. For now, they have the laid back option of leaving this fancy salon sporting wet hair.

“Cyril Stanners in fancy dress next to a model aeroplane,” State Library of Queensland, Australia, 1932

In 1936, these Hamblin glasses for reading in bed made a splash in England and then disappeared. This is what it’s like to live in a constantly changing world – inventions coming and going, morphing and changing as the ideas shift with commerce. The glass (or it’s modern poly plastic counterpart) that was once added as spectacles for the eyes is in our hands, a common part of our daily work built into devices like iPads, Kindles or Nooks. We spend our days looking into this glass world – a mirror or window into an information commons – a reality that claims to be gentle on the eyes using a non-glare back light to make reading a pleasure.

To be or not to be. That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to protect the newly dug garden patch from the digging chickens, thus taking on the identity of the crazy new neighbor, or to go back to the longing of my youth – to be that California surfer girl. That is the question. Or at least one of the many that now face me.

There are other questions as well. Moving to a new place gives everyone a chance to change who they are, become more of who they are or want to be, or even build new dreams, living with the energy that can come from following your heart. Steve Jobs, in his now widely circulated Stanford Commencement Address, took this idea further saying, “follow your heart and intuition: everything else is secondary.” His passing made me realize how much the world has changed because of the inventive creativity that drove his life.

I was asked the other day in a meeting, “what can you offer our team that only you can do?” What an amazing question to consider. We all know ourselves in a certain way – how we’ve grown up, where we’ve gone to school, the kinds of jobs we’ve found, the ways we’ve embraced a family and taken on responsibilities and set up our lives. Sometimes this way of knowing ourselves changes and sometimes it doesn’t. What’s clear for me is that I believe I follow my life and the call of my heart and that what I’ve learned over time is that I’ve developed my wrist (like Picasso said artists do) and the motion of that wrist draws the preferences for how I design my life. And now someone comes along and says, “tell me about how and where those shapes came from – I’d like to know so that we can make sure the work you do is built on the passion that drives you.”

West Coast surfer girl? Partially bilingual daughter of immigrant parents? Artist? Librarian? Writer? Indeed – and it looks like more is on the way.

Illustrated front cover from the Queenslander, 22 November 1934 by Garnet Agnew, State Library of Queensland

Although we have not had a killing frost in the last month we did have a taste of Fall for a few days with October’s temperatures abruptly heading back into the 90’s again. It appears many cultures have what we refer to America as, Indian Summer – that time after harvest when summer comes roaring back for a spell. In Bulgaria this is referred to as tsigansko iyato or “Gypsy Summer;” in Germany, it’s called, Altweibersommer or, “Golden October.” Everyone has a different way of naming these hot days. Perhaps it’s too soon in the calendar year to assume that these coming hot days in mid-October are an Indian Summer, but it’s the only way I know to name this incessant heat that refuses to be tempered by the changing light.

Still reeling from the sudden move across the country to this California summer I find it hard to believe that the changing autumn light is here. Heading to the kitchen in the dark I make my way outside through the sliding doors to welcome the rooster and his chickens with a side arm rock toss that sends them flying over the fence with angry cries. I miss but not by much.

Coming back into the kitchen I realize the light switch needs to be flipped despite the open window slats. This new darker morning is pinched with rain starting to hit the patio roof making the water splats sing in the day.

Drawing of the Incandescent Light Bulb by Thomas Edison, 1/27/1880. The U.S. National Archives.